454 Creative

The site and its processes

We’re a Digital Marketing Agency in Orange County, focused on building growth strategies for established businesses and emerging brands.

This year we set out to re-launch our own branding identity. The launch of our new website served as our announcement.

We’ve been developing websites with ExpressionEngine since 2008, and it has become one of our most used CMS’s. We love the ability to control how content is added and organized, as well as the ability to have complete control over the actual html output. We’re able to create our vision from the ground up, without feeling the constraints and restrictions of your typical CMS.

We wanted our new website to act as a unique experience. It seems incredibly simple on first take, but is increasingly enjoyable to use with surprising details and animations throughout every page. Our new responsive design also allows us to serve an optimized experience to all of our users – no matter what device or browser they’re using.

We couldn’t be happier with our new website, and the reaction we’ve received so far. We hope you get as much enjoyment from using our new website as we did building it!

Add-ons and EE special sauce

Optimization and performance are a large part of any website build. ExpressionEngine makes this process much easier with their new Template Layout feature. Combined with Template Caching, proper disabled entry tags, and script/media optimization, we were able to cut our total load time by over 60%.

Although we have had great experience with many third-party add-ons, the new 454creative.com site is powered by an almost stock ExpressionEngine install. One large exception would be DevDemon’s Channel Images, which makes the process of adding new Work and Blog photos a breeze.